Foucault and Adorno: 2 forms of critique of modernity

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DOI: 10.1177/072551368601500104 1986; 15; 48 Thesis Eleven

Axel Honneth and David Roberts Foucault and Adorno: Two forms of the critique of modernity

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48

Foucault and Adorno:Two forms of the critique of modernity

Axel Honneth

Besides the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the historical-philosophicalmagnum opus of Critical Theory, it would be difficult to find a moreradical attempt to unmask the European Enlightenment than the work ofichel Foucault, devoted to the theory of power. It is no less radical inits conviction of judgement and its pathos of negativism than the work ofAdorno and Horkheimer. Like the Dialectic

~f.E~la~hte~ment the centreof Foucaulfs critique of modernity is the experience of an unparalleledgrowth of power and violence: he sees the history of human emancipa-tion, the &dquo;exit of man from his self incurred t~teia~~9 ~ drawn into thecurrent of a single process of the extension of domination. Both writerstear away the veil which the belief in progress and the optimism of theEnlightenment laid over the process of civilisation by naming without il-lusion the &dquo;gate of the body&dquo;. The silent acts of the enslavement andmutilation of the human body, in which Adorno and Horkheimerperceive the &dquo;subterranean history of Europe&dquo;, Foucault recognises inthe daily disciplining of the body, in its perfect training. For him too thetrue face of human history is revealed in the petrified violence of theprison cell, the virtual drill of the barrack square and the mute violencesof school routine rather than in the moral proclamations of the constitu-tions and the eloquent testimonies of the history of philosophy. The ra-tionalisation of society means for Adorno and for Foucault the inflictionof violence on the human body - this concise thesis appears to offer thepoint of convergence for the critique of modernity on which bothauthors worked throughout their lives.


49

The shared conclusion deceives, however. The harsh judgementAdorno and Foucault pass on the modern age hides the differences whichexist between these two approaches to a critique of modernity. If wewant to test the strengths weaknesses, the possibilities errors of atheory of modernity based on a critique of reason (rationality) we mustfirst explore these divergences. This I will attempt to do by starting withMichel Foucauits theory. In a first step I will reconstruct the develop-ment of this theory to the point that its thematic proximity to Adornosphilosophy of history appears (1). In a second step I will sketch theemerging correspondences to the point where the divergencies betweenboth philosophical approaches starts to become clear (II). In a final stepI will present these differences in such a way that the perspective of animmanent critique of Foucault results(III).

I

Foucault arrived at a diagnosis of the present, which is surprisinglyclose to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, by a quite different path toAdorno. He grew up like the whole generation of French structuralists inthe climate of French post war philosophy, the phenomenology ofMerleau-Ponty and the existentralism of ~~.tr~. It may well have beenthat the teachings of Merlcau-Ponty awoke his interest in the bodily con-stitution of man; however, he broke with phenomenological philosophyjust as decidedly and sharply as his structuralist contempories. For thensocial reality did not to be constituted by the interpretations ofhuman subjects to the degree supposed by the philosophical perspectiveof phenomenology or of ~xistentr~lisr~~ on the contrary, when all thenarcissistic prejudices of anthropocentrism had been cleared away manwould appear as the captive of a chain of events, created by the an-nonymous rules of a social or linguistic order not accessible to humanmeaning. This primary experience of a chain of events beyond the humansubject led to the movement of structuralism in the late fifties; the in-tellectual mood expressed here found its aesthetic echo in the novels ofthe French literary avantgarde.

Foucault always came back to this literary complex of experiencewhen he sought to determine his own genesis; it is the subject matter ofhis most famous literary studies. Foucault used the formula &dquo;thoughtfrom outside&dquo; to characterise the perception of reality crystallised in thetexts of the literary avantgarde; 66ThyS thinking stands outside all subject-ivity, in order to make its limits appear as if from outside, in order toproclaim its end, display its dispersion and to state its final absence.&dquo;


50

Foucault is thinking of writers like Antoine Artaud, PierreKeossowski or Maurice Blanchot when he speaks of the &dquo;disappearanceof the subject&dquo; in the French literature of his time; their aestheticallyestranged presentation of a world in which the human subject is the ob-ject of the sexual automatism of his body, the silent laws of his languageor the anonymous sequence of events of daily life, corresponds to the ar-tificial positivism of the &dquo;nouveau r~m~~~s9~ image of a society withoutfeeling&dquo;3 Foucault sought to interpret these literary tendencies as ex-amples of an aesthetic estrangement in which actions are displaced fromthe horizon of meaning of the subjects to the objectivity of a sequence ofevents outside of meaning. Every segment of a social action complex thusappears as a hermeneutic situation which cannot be further interpreted- that is, as if from the perspective of an observer unfamiliar with agiven meaning complex.

This perspective of the &dquo;stranger&dquo;, which gives the literature of thepost-surrealist avantgarde a particular coldness, is also that on which theinvestigations of the young Foucault into the history of science are bas-ed. These investigations established his theoretical name beyond thefrontiers of his homeland. Foucault undertakes the historiography of theEuropean formations of knowledge with the attitude of an eth~~lc~~is~ heanalyses the thought patterns which shape our history with the ofthe stranger, for whom the whole context of meaning of his own culturehas become alien.&dquo; In this fashion the history of the psychiatrisation ofthe mad, the development of medical knowledge and the constitution ofan anthropocentric world view appears as a cognitive activity whichoperates with anonymous force through the horizon of perception of in-dividuals and creates the culture of the modem age. Of course Foucaulfs sinterest in this process of knowledge is not simply documentary, the 6 di~~r~stic activity&dquo; which inspired his historiography of knowledgewas directed to the harm scientific knowledge inflicted on subjects, sinceit forces upon them through the hardly perceptive violence of a system ofthought the dualism of g ~ ~dn~sS9 9 and &dquo;reason&dquo;, 9 pathologicalbehaviour and rational thought. Foucaults heightened sensibility forthose forms of suffering, which arise from the culturally imposed repres-sion of instinctual and imaginative impulses alone allows us to unders-tand the difficult synthesis achieved by his works on the history ofknowledge: the unusual combination of the knowledge of the scholar,the art of the narrator, the obsessions of the monomaniac and the sens-itivity of the injured - a synthesis morrored in the physiognomy ofFoucaults combination of analytical coldness and sympathetic sensibil-ity. o


51

Foucault, however, developed his studies on the history ofknowledge, which were to form an ~~~r~h~1~y of the European modern~~~,9 only to the point at which the immanent difficulties of his methodall too apparent. Since he wanted to describe the genesis of,systems of thought from the estranged perspective of structuralism as ananonymous activity of the formation of knowledge, as a subjectless ap-pearance disappearance of scientific discourses, he had to leaveunanswered the question whether the constitution of new contents ofknowledge and forms of thought is to be derived from the chance im-pusles of a blind history of events or from the specific constellations of ahistorical situation - there are sufficient indications for both answers inhis writings. Foucault sought the way out of the difficulties posed bysuch uncertainties with his book on the &dquo;archeology of kn~~l~d~~9, hismost difficult, unapproachable text. Only when this attempt trapped inan analysis of knowledge confined to the pure facticity of language ac-tivity had parted, did Foucault turn to the project of an analysis of powerinspired by l~i~tzsch~. If the turn to the theory of power was motivatedtheoretically by the difficulties of a structuralist analysis of knowledge,politically and biographically it was motivated by the failure of the 1968revolt in France: it was the shock experience of the strategically perfectreactions of a politically unshakeable order of power which led Foucaultpersonally to the development of a theory of power. Only with this stepdoes his work leave the framework of the history of knowledge andbecome social analysis: the place of the culturally determining forms ofknowledge is now taken by institutional and cognitive strategies of socialmtergration; and with this Foucault enters the terrain in which the tradi-tion of the Frankfurt School is situated.

In Foucault theory of power the innermost motives of his work, thesensitivity for the excluded impulses of the body and the imagination,asserts itself in the form of a conception of the disciplining of the body.It forms the centre of an ambivalent, indeed contradictory theory ofpower~6 On the one hand Foucault wants to derive the genesis of socialpower from the elementary situation in which subjects with different in-terests confront one another on the work floor of a factory, in school orthe home. It is here in the strategic episodes of everyday life that thepower potentials, which have joined together like a network in the in-stitutions of domination, must be continuously produced. This action,theory approach, which Foucault formulated in the project of a&dquo;microphysics of power&dquo; and directly opposed to Althussers narrowconcept of the power of the state, is contradicted, however, by the othertendency of his theory of power: that of a systems theory which supposes


52

a supra-individual process of the constant perfectivy of techniques ofpower. The syste theory approach finally gains the upper hand in thehistorical studies, the investigation of the 6birth of the prison&dquo; and thecompleted volumes of the history of sexuality. The first study traces inrelation to the institutional establishment of prison punishment the ex-emplary prehistory of the administrative strategy of disciplining the bodywhich underlies the firmly established order of disciplinary power indeveloped societies, while the investigations of sexuality narrate thehistory of 6biplgtic~l&dquo; techniques, of the administration of humansexual life through the scientific organisation of all bodily expressions.

Thus there emerges from Foucaults studies of power, all outstan-ding examples of a theoretically generalised historiography, a picture ofthe European modern age which strikingly resembles that of the Dialecticof Enlightenment. The sentences with which Foucault summarised theresults of his study Discipline and Punish sound as though they are in-tended to emphasize this convergence:

Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisebecame in the course of the eighteenth century thepolitically dominant class was masked by the establish-meant of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarianjuridical framework, made possible by the organizationof a parliamentary, representative regime. But thedevelopment and generalization of disciplinarymechanisms constituted the other dark side of these pro-cesses. The general juridical form that guaranteed asystem of rights that were egalitarian in principle wassupported by these tiny, everyday, physicalmechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power thatare essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that wecall the disciplines .... The real, corporal disciplinesconstituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liber-ties. The contract may have been regarded as the idealfoundation of law and political power; panopticismconstituted the technique, universally widespread, ofcoercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridicalstructures of society, in order to make the effectivemechanisms of power function in opposition to the for-mal framework that it had acquired. The Enlighten-ment, which discovered the liberties, also invented thedisciplines.


53

11

Only when we have followed Foucault as far as this passage fromthe investigation of prisons can we recognize the underground relation-ship between his theory of power and Adornos philosophy of history,Admittedly Adornos critique of the modern age is shaped above all bythe traumatic experience of fascism and stalinism; the historical point ofreference of his construction of history was not the smooth functioningof late capitalist societies but the violent rule of terroristic leadership cli-ques. Equally Adornos philosophy is shaped far more by literarymodernism from Kafka to Beckett than by Surrealism and its avantgardecontinuations. His basic literary experience is not the facelessautomatism of human life but the failure of individual self-realisation.There is, however, one conviction which is just as constitutive for Ador-nos critique of the modern age as for Foucaults diagnosis of modernrelations of power. The passage quoted above illuminates this shareddimension; for Adorno as for Foucault instrumental rationality is Ibelieve the historically effective principle of thought which compels mento do violence to their bodily-corporal potentials of behaviour. To thisextent the critique of instrumental reason in both theories only acquiresits full meaning by reference to the vital dimension of the human body,which is assumed as the &dquo;pre-rational sphere&dquo; from which the principleof instrumental rationality violently abstracts. The construction of theconcept of rationality in Adorno and Foucault is guided by the compas-sionate awareness of the sufferings of the human body. This is the inneraffinity in their critique of the modern age.

It is from this viewpoint that I want to bring out the theoreticalassumptions which Adorno and Foucault appear to share as a conse-quence of the basic conviction underlying their critique of the modernage:

(a) Both Adornos critique of the modern and ahe Foucaults analysis ofpower are clearly embedded in an overriding theory which understandsthe process of civilisation as a process of technical or instrumentalrationalisation. Whereas Adornos concept of rationalisation is orientedto the model of the domination of nature, Foucaults concept is basedrather on the model of social control. &dquo;Rationalisation&dquo; means in firstline for Adorno, wholly in the sense of a Marxist reading of Weber, theincrease of the producive forces, for Foucault by contrast, in the sense ofa Nietzschean interpretation of Weber, the increase of the means ofsocial control and

~wer.9 The former actually means instrumental ra-


54

tionality, the latter, however, strategic rationality. But both writers sharethe assumption that this overriding process of rationalisation perfects thetechnical means of social domination under the cloak of moral eman-cipation and thus produces the modern, forcefully unified individual.The increase of domination and the formation of identity are two sidesof the one process of instrumental rationalisation. The price of thisongoing process of rationalisation becomes apparent as soon as we con-sider what Foucault calls the &dquo;dark side&dquo;&dquo;, Adorno and Horkheimerthe &dquo;underground history&dquo;&dquo; of European modernisation: it is thehistory of suffering, given by the progressive disciplining and subjectionof living subjectivity, barely hidden by the juridical superstructure. Andthis brings us to the second theoretical similarity between Ador~o9s andFoucaulfs critique of the modern age.

b) Like Adorno Foucault sees the human body as the real victim ofthe overall process of instrumental rationalisation. For both living sub-jectivity, progressively disciplined and repressed, expresses itself primar-ily through the vital impulses of the human body. At this stage it is notclear what concept of the human body Adorno and Foucault employ inorder to make their assertion plausible. What is clear is that the measureof the burdens of instrumental rationalisation derives not from an ex-tended concept of rationality but from a concept of bodily subjectivity.At first sight their common theme is not the suppression of anotherdimension of social rationality but the destruction of the open spaces ofbodily freedom. Against the background of these two basic assumptions,the overriding concept of instrumental rationalisation and the vaguecounter concept of bodily subjectivity, the common presuppositions ofAdornos and Foucaults theory of the modern age can now be discerned.

c) Adorno and Foucault both place the real roots of social modern-ity in the radical intellectual and political changes around 1 ~. ForFoucault this epoch constitutes a threshhold in the history of power: I atthe beginning of the nineteenth century the various techniques of cor-poral discipline and the human sciences which emerged from police inter-rogation coalesce to form in his eyes the disciplinary power which hadhelped shape modern society since then. The philosophical consciousnessof the Enlightenment hides this revolutionary break in the history ofpower under the veil of humanism by elevating itself to moral univers-alism. Adornos ideological-critical view of the philosophicalachievements of the Enlightenment is based on a similar perspective. Iffor him the phase of upheaval around 1800 is not the time of theestablishment of new techniques of domination but the decisive phase ofthe establishment of the capitalist market, he discovers, however, just


55

like Foucault in the universalistic motifs of the Enlightenment, above allin the of truth, justice freedom the violent aspect of an identi-fying thinking which subsumes the particular under the general. In thisrespect Adornos critique of Kanfs concept of freedom is the comple-to the interpretation of the human, sciences developed by Foucaultin The order of 7~~.~ Adomo and Foucault both proceed from thethat the basis both for a knowledge which secures domination andfor the superstructure of a legal system which veil domination wascreated in the Enlightenment period through the generaiisation oftheoretical and moral validity claims. It is this presupposition whichmakes the image of the European modern age so particularly limited andlacking definition in both theories. That is, Adorno and Foucauit mustboldly and onesidedly abstract from the cultural and moral advancesrealised in the institutions of the constitutional states, in the proceduresof formal democratic elections and in the emancipatory models of theformation of identity. Since both theories are unable to do justice to therational content of the modern process of rationalisation they entrapthemselves in the same aporia of a totalising critique of reason: they can-not be sure of their own medium, of rational content of theoreticalargumentation. I I

d) Finally a fourth feature common to Adorno and Foucault is their rdiagnosis of the forms off integration of contemporary societies. Bothevidently perceive the civilising process of instrumental rationalisationculminating in organisations of domination capable of completely con-trolling directing social life. The stability of highly developedsocieties is the result solely of the regulative capacities of administrativelyhighly perfect organisations: these organisations intervene like total in-stitutions in the life context of every single individual in order to makehim a conforming member of society through disciplining and control,manipulation and drilling. According to their conception of dominationmodern societies are in principle totalitarian societies&dquo; - that isquintessence of the analyses Adorno and Foucault undertake of theforms of integration of late capitalist societies. However, a closer inspec-tion reveals at this point a first small difference which in fact will makeall the difference: Adorno sees the totalitarian operations of controlrealised through the psychic manipulations of the mass media, i.e. by theagencies of the culture industry, whereas Foucault believes that the in-tegrating operations are secured rather through those corporaldisciplinary procedures performed by such loosely related institutions asthe school, the factory or the prison. What interests me here is not thedifference between the rather statist model of social compulsion to which


56

Adorno inclined and Foucaults structuralist model of compulsion, butrather the decisive question of the concept of the subject which isreflected in the differing analyses of society. In a third step I will followthe implications of this difference to the point at which it becomes clearthat a fundamentally different critique of human subjectivity forms thebasis of both theories of the modern age.

tn

Foucault understands the force of control which emanates from theruling institutions as a force of corporal disciplining: the vital impulse ofthe human body are forcefully broken by perfect drilling and training,coerced into an habitual pattern and thereby disciplined. The basis ofmodern practices of power is formed as it is part of our quote, by the&dquo;corporal disciplines&dquo;. In comprehension of these techniques directed tothe body because he considers the psychic qualities of the subjects, thatis, their personality structures, as in toto products of certain kinds of cor-poral disciplining: the psychic individuality of a subject is thus seen asthe precipitate of external action on his body. Foucaulfs almostbehavioristic positing of individuals as formless and conditionablecreatures owes much to his structuralist beginnings.

Adorno of course argues differently: he understands the force ofcontrol which emanates from the centralised organisations of ad-ministration as a force of psychic influence. The basis of modernorganisations of dominance is formed by the techniques of culturalmanipulation in the mass media. Adorno accords these strategies ofmanipulation such importance because he regards it as one of thecharacteristics of the post-liberal era of capitalism that subjects have lostthe psychic strength for practical self-determination&dquo;; the techniques ofmanipulation are only able to dispose over individuals as if over object-ified natural processes because subjects are beginning to lose the ego-capacities acquired in the course of the history of civilisation at the ex-pense of aesthetic capacities. Adorno grasps what Foucault in his theoryof power appears as it were ontologically to assume - the conditionabil-ity of subjects - as the historical product of a process of civilisationwhich goes back to the early stages of the history of mankind. As this dif-ference shows Adorno is guided in his conception of the modern age by adifferent critique of the modern subject to Foucault. He has somethingelse in mind with his problematising of modern individuality thanFoucault with his idea of a deconstruction of the subject.~7 WhereasAdornos critique of the modern subject is intended as a historical-


57

philosophical questioning of the instrumental form of organisation ofhuman subjectivity. Foucault bases himself theoretically on a linguisticand to this extent principal cridque of the meaning constituting subject inorder to demonstrate that the modern individual is nothing but a violent-ly produced fiction. Whereas Adorno criticise the modern age from thestandpoint of a possible reconciliation of the subject with his drives andimagination split off by civilisation, Foucault attacks the idea of humansubjectivity itself. This difference in approach in the critique of the sub-ject, the difference between a critique inspired by philosophy of historyand a principal critique derived from linguistic of the modern model ofthe subject, naturally alters the framework within which reference can bemade to bodily-corporal behaviour. In order to illustrate this I will pre-sent the two versions of a critique of the subject a little more exactly.

Adorno philosophy of history contains, if I understand it rightly, acritique of the subject on two levels. On the first level the emergence ofthe modern subject is interpreted as a process of repressive identity for-mation in the frame of an anthropologically oriented theory of civilisa-tion : only through sensory limitations and instinctionai repressions arethe ego capacities formed which as a whole denote the concept of the~6sub~~~t&dquo; in the modern age. On a second social psychological level it isthen empirically asserted that this ego is disintegrating under contem-porary conditions because the socio-cultural preconditions for thenecessary acts of discipline are disappearing. The normative frameworkin which this historical-philosophical argument is embedded, is provided,however, by an aesthetic theory of successful ego fora~~.tiorae. Thistheory posits like the German Romantics that the formation of humanidentity leads to a spontaneous self-identical ego only to the degree thatthere is free communication between outer sensory impressions and theinner sensibility of the subject; the human being attains freedom to thedegree that it opens instinct and imagination to the sensuous multiplicityof natural impressions - this is what Adorno means when he speaks inNegative Dialectics of the aesthetic concept of ego identity which ob-viously presents an idiosyncratic amalgam of Nietzsche, Freud andKlages/ provides Adorno not only with the yardstick point of orienta-tion, for an interpretation of the process of civilisation. Because Adornois guided by a concept of bodily freedom he can see in the psychic suffer-ing of the neurotic or the schizophrenic the speechless proclamation ofthe human impulse to self-reconciliation, to the reintegration of thedrives split off by civilisation. This is the reason why Adorno alwayssought to demonstrate the yardstick which he made the foundation of hiscritique of the modern age with his aesthetic concept of ego-identity, by


58

reference to the suffering of the psychically ill, who testify not to anintra-social reconciliation but to the memory of its repression.

Foucault too could have understood his critique of the modern age,motivated by the same compassionate awareness of the injuries to thehuman body, in this fashion: he could have regarded the psychic suffer-ing of individuals as the social expression of the disciplining and repres-sion which affects the human body. We find, however, no trace of an in-terpretative approach of this kind in F~c~~lt~s writings; the understand-ing of the psychic suffering of subjects as a last individual impulse toreconciliation was alien to him. His critique of the subject stood in theway just as Adornos critique demanded such an understanding. Theframework of the critique of the subject which enters into Foucaultsconception of the modern age is given by a linguistically groundeddestruction of the meaning constituting subject~. According to him themodern subject is finally nothing but the fictive unity generated either bythe anonymous rules of discourse or produced by violent strategies ofdomination. But if the individual is denied every intentional impulse thenthe psychic suffering of the subject can no longer be interpreted as thesilent expression of a rape of human body.&dquo; That is why as a conse-quence of his structuralist critique of the subject, Foucault must in-troduce the human body as a faceless, endlessly conditionable bundle ofenergy. The theoretical dilemma, however, to which his quasi-behavioristic concept of the body leads, is obvious: although everythingin his critique of the modern age appears concentrated on the sufferingof the human body under the disciplinary action of the modernapparatus of power, there is nothing M his theory which could articulatethis suffering as suffering. His theory finally into a version of the Dialec-tic of Enlightenment reduced to systems theory,. He is forced to describewith the positivistic equanimity of a Luhmann an objective process of theincrease of power, which Adorno was still able to attack by means of anadmittedly problematic philosophy of history. 23

Translated by David Roberts.


59

Notes1. Cf. v. Descombes, The Self and the Other (Cambridge), ch.3; E. Kurz Weil, The

Age of Structuralism, New York 1980.

2. "La oensee du dehors", Critique 195/196, 1962.

3. Cf. Foucault, "Le language de 1espace", Critique 203, 1964.

4. Cf. A. Honneth, Kritik der Macht (Frankfurt 1985), ch.4.5. Cf. H.L. Dreyfus, P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and

Hermeneutics (Chicago 1982), ch,1, 4.6. A. Honneth, Kritik der Macht, ch.5.

7. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. W.A. Sheridan (London 1979),p.222.

8. Cf. Th. Adorno, Notes zur Literatur. fesammelte Schriften 11, Frankfurt 1974.

9. The relation between the power theory of Foucault and the sociology of dominationin Weber has not been investigated in detail. See however B. Smart, Foucault, Marx-ism and Critique (London 1983), ch.6.

10. Discipline and Punish, p.222.11. M. Horkkeimer, Th. Adorno, Dialectik der Aufklaning (Frankfurt 1969), p.246.12. Discipline and Punish, ch.4.

13. On the place of Kant in Foucaults Words and Things cf. J. Habermas, Derphilosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt 1985), ch.9.

14. J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, ch.5.

15. Cf. the convincing objections of A. Giddens, A Contemporary Critique ofHistorical Materialism, vol.1 (London 1981), p.171 ff.

16. For Adornos psychoanalytically informed theory of the weakness of the ego in con-temporary society see "Die revidierte Psychoanalyse" and "Zum Verhaltues vonSoziologie und Psychologie" in Adorno, gesammelte Schriften 8 (Frankfurt 1972),p.20 ff. and 42 ff.

17. Here I follow Albrecht Wellmans distinction between various forms of critique ofthe subject in Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne (Frankfurt 1985), p.48ff. esp. p.70. See also Peter Dews, "Power and Subjectivity in Foucault", New LeftReview 144 (1984), p.72 ff.

18. Cf. Dialektik der Aufklarung, p.198.19. Th. Adorno, Negative Dialektik in Gesammelte Schriften 6, p.277.20. For the influence of Nietzsche see Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der

Moderne, ch.5; for the affinity with Klages see A. Honneth "Lespirit et son objet"in G.Raulet (ed.), Weimar on lexplosion de la modernite (Paris 1984), p.97 ff.

21. Cf. Manfred Frank, Was heijst Neostrukturalismus (Frankfurt 1984), 9/10 lecture.22. On the problematic of the concept of the body in Foucaults theory see H. Dreyfus,

P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p. 110 ff.23. For a critique of Adornos philosophy of history see A. Honneth Kritik der Macht,

ch.2.


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Foucault and Adorno: 2 forms of critique of modernity

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